


True or False

by Nevanna



Category: X-Men Evolution
Genre: Brainwashing, False Memories, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 06:07:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3108899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevanna/pseuds/Nevanna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times that Wanda's forgotten past intruded on her new life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	True or False

**Author's Note:**

> **Content warning:** References to institutionalization, neglect, and conditioning; spoilers for the entire series.
> 
> This was written in response to the "brainwashing/deprogramming" prompt for Hurt/Comfort Bingo 2014.

1.

Wanda’s eyes flew open, and the harsh sound of her own breathing was deafening in her ears. For a moment, she didn’t understand why she couldn’t move, until she realized that the sheets had twisted around her while she tossed and turned. Across the room, her desk chair had fallen over, her closet door had flown open, and some of her clothes had slithered off their hangers onto the floor.

She was in her own room, in the house that she shared with the rest of the Brotherhood, where there were no bed checks, no locks on the outsides of the doors, no needles or electrodes or straitjackets.

When she slipped downstairs for a glass of water, she found Pietro perched on the kitchen counter. “Couldn’t sleep?” he asked her. “Me, neither.”

“Maybe you should go for a run around the Tri-State area,” she teased.

“Maybe you should try hanging upside down,” he shot back. “Isn’t that how vampire bats sleep?”

If anybody else in the house had made a comment like that, he would have found himself blasted into a wall, but instead, she surprised herself by letting out a short laugh. “Hey, remember when Father used to make us chamomile tea before bed?”

“Sure, I remember that.” Pietro’s eyes slid toward the door. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Maybe I should put some on the next shopping list.”

“You do that, sis. Like anything is going to slow me down.”

Upstairs, Wanda closed her eyes and practiced the measured breathing that Agatha had taught her. The hospital in her dream had felt, smelled, and sounded as real as if she had been there, although she knew that she never had.

2.

Nothing was left of her father. There were no personal effects, no photographs, and definitely not a body to bury. There was just a video clip of him vanishing in a starburst, thousands of miles away, and a small group of former acolytes who barely seemed interested in mourning him.

A few days afterward, Wanda walked into the house to the sound of Todd’s usual verbal slime. “…I mean, can you imagine growing up with Magneto as a dad? Like, did he go to parent-teacher conferences in his cape and helmet? Stuff Speedy and Wanda-kins into them metal spheres when they misbehaved?”

“I dunno if you should be talking like that, man,” Fred remarked. “My folks always taught me not to speak ill of the dead.”

But Todd was on a roll. “‘No getting in Daddy’s way when he’s planning to take over the world, children!’” He made a pathetic try for Magneto’s deep, powerful voice. “‘Clean your plates, or else you can’t live with me on Asteroid M when you’re older…’”

His last word ended in a squawk as Wanda stepped into the room, hex energy crackling around her hands. “You were _saying_?” she inquired. “Go on. I didn’t want to interrupt.”

Todd hopped a few feet closer to her. “Sweetums, I didn’t mean any of it. You know I’m here for you in your time of need.”

“What I _need_ is for you to shut up about things you don’t understand. Both of you!” She turned and stalked out of the room.

“Guess we know which stage of grief she’s at,” she heard Todd say from behind her.

“Dunno,” Fred repeated. “I didn’t see any difference from how she is normally.”

Wanda wouldn’t have said so aloud, but as disgusted as she was with Todd, she knew, on some level, where he had been coming from, and why he might want to blow off some steam: the Magneto he had known wasn’t exactly a kind or compassionate leader. This did not mean that any of his Brotherhood, other than Pietro or herself, had the right to talk about what Erik Magnus Lehnsherr had been like as a parent.

Yet, if possible, Pietro seemed more callous in the aftermath than any of their teammates. He had grown up alongside her, he had the same memories of a father who taught them to read and cooked breakfast for them and stayed awake into the night when they were sick, but he was the one who dismissed “the old man” as a bully who had deserved what he had gotten. 

They were riding a train downtown when she told Pietro, for the third or fourth time, to stop talking like that. “He wasn’t the loving father you remember,” he flung back at her. “In fact, you hated him.”

At those words, Wanda’s nose and ears were filled with the sensations from her nightmares: heavy footsteps, the sting of antiseptic, the restraints around her hands, and the anger that flared so quickly and ferociously that it scared her.

_You locked me away_ , a voice whispered as her head started to throb and the train car began to tremble around them.

3.

The librarian probably thought that she was just another teenage witch-wannabe looking for the newest bestseller by Anne Rice or Silver RavenWolf, but the books that Wanda was looking for were actually in the psychology section. As she glanced from the call numbers that marked the shelves to the slip of paper in her hand, she heard someone say her name.

Two of the X-Men were sharing a nearby table, with books and three-ring binders spread in front of them. One of the girls had her laptop open, and she actually smiled and waved before Wanda could duck into the stacks. “What’s going on?” she asked cheerfully.

Since they had fought Apocalypse side by side, Kitty Pryde seemed to think that they were friends. Friendship had never been very high on Wanda’s list of priorities, nor was she sure that she’d be very good at it, especially not with a recreational do-gooder who doodled flowers on the covers of her notebooks. But Kitty had been a pretty good fighter when she needed to be, and her company off the battlefield wasn’t as unpleasant as Wanda’s teammates (with the obvious exception of Lance) had always claimed. “Hey,” she said aloud.

“I don’t know what you’re up to, but if you want to join us, there’s plenty of room…” Kitty looked their belongings, which took up three quarters of the table. “Or, you know, we could make plenty of room.”

Rogue scowled, and muttered something under her breath that sounded very like, “You _gotta_ be kidding me.”

“Come on, Rogue, _don’t_ ,” Kitty implored. “She hasn’t done anything to us.”

“ _This_ time.”

Kitty was undeterred. “Besides…”

“If your next sentence starts with ‘Professor Xavier says,’ I’m out of here,” Rogue warned her, though she flashed a quick grin as she said it. “But you’re right, I guess. Sorry, Wanda.” She paused. “Um… Wanda?”

But Wanda was chasing the memory of those same words, _Professor Xavier says_ , spoken in that same mocking tone. Whoever had said them had been speaking over her head, wearing rubber gloves and (she could have sworn) nurse’s scrubs, while she swabbed Wanda’s arm with alcohol. _“Professor Xavier_ says _she needs time to heal, to learn control, but_ I _say that if he had to deal with her every day and every night instead of sailing in and out as he pleases, he’d be singing a different tune.”_

Pain flared between her eyes, as it had on the train ride weeks ago, and then she was back in the sunny library, with a merciful lack of property damage, and the worried faces of two girls staring at her. _Worried… about me?_ “Yeah,” she said. “I got lost in my head for a second. Apology accepted, I guess.”

“Hey, so, you think you’re going to finish high school now?” Kitty asked. “Or do you have other plans?”

Wanda had never _started_ high school in the sense that Kitty was talking about; she and her brother had been home-schooled until her father had started considering the requirements of _homo sapiens_ and their society beneath him. Since he had come back from the dead, he hadn’t spoken of his next move, and although his embraces and attempts to reconnect with his children _seemed_ sincere, Wanda had caught him looking at her with something she never thought she’d see in his face: _fear_.

“I don’t know,” she said now, and was at once surprised, frightened, and excited to discover that it was true.

4.

Wanda rested her hand for a moment against the carousel horse that had been her favorite as a child. Like its companions, it was at rest for the night.

“I admit that I never imagined you or your brother working for a human government organization, or using your powers to defend their world.” Like his daughter, Erik Lehnsherr was dressed in civilian clothes, although apparently he hadn’t been able to resist stepping dramatically out of the shadows when he arrived in the park. 

“There are a lot of ways to protect mutants, as well as humans, Father,” Wanda pointed out. 

Erik nodded. “I have become very aware of this over the last three years, and have reconsidered my own plans for this world… and my wishes for my children.” He touched her face briefly. “You do not need to fear that I will try to force either of you into roles that I have chosen.” 

“I wasn’t afraid,” Wanda whispered. “But thank you.”

Her job with S.H.I.E.L.D. had given her a chance to do something with her life, to pursue a goal apart from… the word _revenge_ slithered suddenly, sickeningly, across her mind again, and then that was gone, too.

And good riddance.

5.

When Wanda put aside her history with the people who lived there (as much as she ever could), Xavier’s estate was as good a place as any to recover (as much as she ever could) during her leave of absence. Her father had departed in a hurry, and most of the X-Men gave her the space that she needed. Today, however, Rogue had joined her in the gazebo overlooking the shore, and Wanda hadn’t told her to go away.

She had been forced to render Wanda unconscious when she lost control during a mission. Both the X-Men and the mutants of S.H.I.E.L.D. had been dispatched to deal with the hostage situation together, and even after everybody was out safely, the smell of rain on concrete and the cries of the children, and Wanda’s own fierce anger at what they had been through, had caused her to slip backward for the first time in years. 

Rogue had also given her the short version of what her psychic friends would later explain in much more detail: that very few of Wanda’s childhood memories of her father and brother had actually happened, that he had abandoned her in a mental institution when her powers became too dangerous, and that she had only been released because more people thought she would be useful. The headaches and hex flare-ups that had accompanied her flashbacks had been deliberately placed by one of Magneto’s minions, to keep her from thinking too much about what they meant, or from seeking answers.

“Are you going after him?" Rogue asked now.

"Maybe."

Rogue half-smiled. “ _Revenge of the Scarlet Witch, Part II_?”

“He had me locked up. He reprogrammed me into something that he could use, and he made sure my brother and the rest of his little _Brotherhood_ lied to me about it for _years_.” Wanda's mind still felt like a dish towel that someone had wrung out and twisted, and the real and false memories collided with each other almost daily, intertwining and mixing together no matter how carefully she and Xavier tried to pick them apart. “I don’t understand how he thinks he can play with people’s lives like that, and I don’t know if I care.”

“Yeah.” Rogue spoke the next words so quietly that Wanda wasn’t sure, for a moment, if she’d heard her correctly. “I’ve been there.”

Wanda wasn’t entirely surprised to find out that she wasn’t the only one whose parents had her brainwashed for their own purposes, but after the past few days, she wasn't sure anything would ever surprise her again. “So what’d you do about it?”

“I made a lot of choices – some good, some bad.” Rogue was looking past her now. A breeze had come up off the water, and the sun was dipping toward the horizon. “Looks like it’s your turn, now.”

“I don’t know if my head’s clear enough for that yet,” Wanda said. She still wondered sometimes which of her thoughts and memories were her own, and knew that she might keep questioning that for the rest of her life. The past was a tangle of true and false, and the future was even more of a blank page than it had been before, but Wanda needed to believe that someday, both of them could be _hers_.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to for KatiaSwift for her support during the writing process.


End file.
